At the end of last week we brought some crushing news to owners of the Xperia PLAY smartphone from Sony Ericsson: It had seemingly been removed from the list of Sony devices updating to Android 4.0.

Sony has now confirmed this in a recent blog post about updating to Ice Cream Sandwich. The Xperia PLAY will not be updating to ICS, as Sony explains:

“In regards to Xperia PLAY, after extensive in house testing with our developer teams and working with our partners, we have concluded that a consistent and stable experience, particularly with gaming, cannot be guaranteed for this smartphone on Ice Cream Sandwich – therefore, we will not make the Android 4.0 upgrade available for Xperia PLAY.

This decision was also verified when we received similar feedback from the developer community; both experienced developers and advanced users, along with game content providers following our ICS beta ROM for unlocked Xperia PLAY smartphones.

Our priority has and always will be, to provide the best possible user experience on Xperia smartphones. In this instance the ICS upgrade would have compromised stability, where we look to ensure a quality gaming experience with games optimized and developed for Xperia PLAY.”

Original Article

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be good news for anyone who happens to have the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Play, especially if you have been patiently waiting for the ICS update for Android.

If you have an XPERIA device, you may be aware that Sony released a list of devices back in December last year that showed which phones would be getting the ICS update and when. However, the latest version of this list has just been released, and it’s been noticed that the XPERIA Play is no longer one of those devices due to get the update.

Sony have yet to give any reason as to why they have removed the XPERIA Play from the list, it’s strange considering that they released an ICS Beta ROM for the Play.

For anyone not familiar with the XPERIA Play, it became the first Android smartphone to be part of the “PlayStation Certified” program, which as I’m sure you’ll be aware, allows you to play PlayStation games directly on the device. The handset launched back in April 2011 in the UK and currently has Android 2.3 installed. It has a respectable specification which consists of a Snapdragon 1 GHz CPU along with 512MB of RAM and a 854 x 480 resolution display.

Since its release it has proven to be a popular handset, and no doubt there will be many users who are frustrated by the latest news. So no doubt users will be waiting for Sony to make some sort of an announcement to let users know why they have decided to abandon the update for the XPERIA Play. And if/when they do, we’ll make sure you’re in the know.

If you want to check out the latest info regarding the ICS update for Sony XPERIA phones, you can head on over to the Sony Mobile support site.